By Gianna Absi

It seems like today, there isn’t a single person without some type of smart phone. We look around, or more commonly, we look down at our screens, and everyone is either texting, tweeting, instagramming, or snap chatting. A short time ago, we had to actually have human interaction to give someone a message or to even just say hi. Now, we can Skype or Facetime and communicate with an LCD screen. That’s not even the worst part. Recent studies have shown that our attention span has been rapidly decreasing because of this. On average, humans have the attention span of 8 seconds. Let me just repeat that really quick, 8 SECONDS. That is a shorter attention span than a goldfish. We cannot pay attention longer than a goldfish…
This short attention span is a huge problem in society. Children are failing to read books properly because they cannot hold their attention long enough to stay on the page. Adults cannot finish one project at a time because they get bored of it and want to move onto something else. The list goes on. So what are we going to do to stop this? We can’t get rid of smart phones, which is the major cause of this loss of attention. We can’t give every person Aderall, a medication used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, to keep them focused, as that would be inefficient and a waste of money. However, there is one thing that people can do for themselves to help increase their attention span: meditate.
When people hear the word mediation, they usually picture a person sitting on the floor with their eyes closed, their thumb and middle fingers touching, making the ‘om’ sound. Yes, this is one way to meditate, but what many people don’t know is that there is a variety of other ways to meditate and be mindful. All you have to do is focus; pay attention to your thoughts and feelings in the current moment. I know that in today’s society, asking someone to focus and pay attention is a very big request, but everyone is capabile of this, even if it’s only for 8 seconds. The key to this is to do it a few times a day and increase your time spent meditating as each day passes. There have been countless studies done on mediation and attention. It has been proven that meditating at least once a day increases your attention span and improves many other things. How does meditation do this? Meditating every day increases cortical thickness in the brain. This has been proven through brain imaging before and after subjects went through different meditation programs. This increase in cortex leads to an increase in attention, which ultimately leads to better memory. When we are able to hold our attention longer, we retain more information so, simply put, we are able to remember more stuff.
There are so many positive effects of meditation. Not only does it lead to an increase in attention and memory, but it also reduces stress levels, increases relaxation levels, increases energy levels, decreases respiratory rate, increases blood flow, and so much more. Meditation definitely has the possibility of solving society’s attention problem and so many more problems, but only if people take the short amount of time out of their day to do it.

How would you feel if you had the choice of having billions of tiny robots injected into your body? A pretty unpleasant thought, am I right? What if I told you that these tiny robots could repair any mutation you may have in your DNA? Sound far-fetched? Well, scientists have been making huge breakthroughs in this! It’s called nanotechnology. These small robots are like tiny computers that are coded to attach to specific cells in your body and carry them from point A to point B. These tiny robots, 1-100nm in size (or 1 and 100 billionth of a meter!), are like transporters; they pick up the target cell at point A and move it to point B. Point B can be anything from the trash, (cell death) if the cell is not needed anymore, to another part of the body where the cell is needed. They also have the ability to reprogram a cell’s biology. If more of one cell is needed in a particular area it can bring that cell to the specified area and “tell” it to replicate. Basically, nanotechnology will eventually perfect every single cell in your body.

Do you ever think about your childhood or replay an event in your head that happened 15 years ago but its so vivid that it seems like it happened yesterday? Do you ever hear something and think it sounds like your favorite song and then start singing that song? These are memories that were formed in your brain that are replayed as a result of a specific stimulus. For a long time scientists believed that memories were formed, processed, and sent to different destinations in the brain. Dr. Wilder Penfield was one of the first to accidentally discover this. In the 40s he electrically stimulated different areas of his patients’ brains while they were under local anesthesia and found that the region he stimulated would elicit specific memories in the patient’s life (see video below). For example, in one of his patients he stimulated her temporal lobe (auditory cortex) and she started to hum her favorite song out loud. This suggested that the memory of this song was stored in the place where it was processed or originated (i.e. the auditory cortex processed the first time she listened to the song). Penfield concluded that the cortex (the outer layers of the brain) stored the “complete record of the stream of consciousness; all those things in which a man was aware at any time…” Until recently, scientists have believed this phenomenon.

Have you ever watched the show “I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant”? I don’t know about you, but I have never understood how that could happen, because of all of the symptoms and telltale signs that come with pregnancy. What I am about to talk about is a condition that is completely opposite of this reality television show. It is a condition where a woman actually believes she is pregnant and gets all of the symptoms, including an enlarged belly and breasts, but there is no baby inside of her. This is called Pseudocyesis, or more commonly, Phantom Pregnancy.

I am assuming that whoever is reading this right now has had a dream before. Am I right? But have you ever had a dream with a person in it whom you have never seen before in your life? It may seem that way, but it is impossible. It is believed that the human brain is incapable of “creating” a new face. Every person you dream of has been someone you have either known personally or merely came across looking through your friend’s Facebook photos. Even those whom you do not consciously notice but still look at as you pass by may be an implanted image in your brain and show up later when you are dreaming.

Sigmund Freud is most famous for his definition and study of dreams. He taught about the unconscious and based it on repression and how some ideas and events in one’s life are repressed and brought up later in life. Freud believed in a cycle where these repressed ideas remain in the mind while removed from consciousness. They reappear and become a part of our consciousness only at specific times, for example, in our dreams.More

Ever wonder why children can learn certain things, such as languages, faster than adults? There is a time in every human’s life called the critical period, and it takes place during the most intense period of development, childhood. During this time a child’s brain has high neuroplasticity, almost like a sponge. Many new pathways are formed as the child experiences new things. It has always been believed that when our critical period ends it never comes back but recent study has been done with the drug Valproate that increased neural plasticity in adults and may have reopened this critical period.

Valproate is a drug most commonly used for bipolar disorder and epilepsy. It is also known to inhibit an enzyme called histone- deacetylase, or HDAC. HDAC is an enzyme in the brain that slows down neural plasticity. Inhibition of this enzyme by Valproate allows the reopening of pathways in the brain, increasing neuroplasticity, thus reopening the critical period.